How a trapper keeper can ruin a souffle

My sister is a teacher. She works with special needs kids. This pretty much makes her a saint and also adds further evidence to the case that she can in no way really be related to me. I think she must have been switched at birth. Somewhere in the world there is a misanthropic, chain smoking, brunette lawyer or ad exec of about 29 sitting up late at night writing a blog about how she must have been switched at birth because she has nothing in common with her blonde, blue-eyed sisters with their sunny dispositions and endless patience, not to mention altruistic career choices like peace activism or teaching special needs kids in a public school. Don't get me wrong, I'd dig her, but my family clearly got the better end of that little hospital mishap.

One of my sister's colleagues concocted a plan to incentivize listening for a particularly intractable student. The kid kind of has his own thing going on and doesn't really want outside input. So the teacher devised one of those sticker incentive programs wherein you accrue a certain number of stickers, each sticker earned by one instance of listening and then following directions, and once you've reached a pre-determined goal for sticker accrual you can turn that into a reward. Like an eraser. Or a pencil. The stipulation was that the teacher would ask the kid something and if he responded by the second time she asked, he earned a sticker and was suddenly on his way toward the exciting goal of winning an eraser. Oh, the joy. The kid picked up on this system pretty quickly and learned to only respond the 2nd time something was asked of him.

Two things. This teacher does not own a dog. Dog training 101 states that you never repeat a command. Because if you are willing to say sit....sit......siiiiiiiittttt....sssssiiiiiiittttt.....SIT......SSSSIIIIITTTTT!!!!
Then the dog understands that the first 5 instances of "sit" are some kind of random human foreplay, and the only one that really means anything at all is the sixth one that is shouted at ear piercing decibals with crazy eyes and popping veins.

The other thing, how lame are grade school incentives? An eraser?! A pencil? A trapper keeper featuring Strawberry Shortcake art on the cover??

That last one was awesome and I learned my times tables perfectly up to 11 until I accrued enough points to earn that beauty. I didn't do well at all with 12. I'd already got my trapper keeper, Seriously, what was my motivation for further memorization of something trivial like being able to multiply by 12? That was my reasoning at 9 years old and apparently I had not been educated about the english measuring system, which for no fucking good reason is somehow based on 12. Prematurely earning that Strawberry Shortcake trapper keeper has haunted me my whole life and led to some really bad kitchen accidents involving the miscalculation of ounces. Because it's only based on 12 when you're talking about inches in a foot, it turns out it's based on 8 when you're talking about ounces in a cup. Do not get me fucking started on the english system of measurement and trying to cook anything out of a British cookbook. Nigella is a whore.

(I love Nigella. I didn't mean that. She taught me that you can freeze leftover wine in ziploc bags and use it later for cooking. Or, sometimes, in case of emergency. Wine emergency. It's a real thing, people.)